While it appears to be a simple question, in reality, answering the idea of who you trust with your fitness is rarely an easy one.

It’s almost impossible to have an interest in fitness and not find yourself on the receiving end of a deluge of advice. Even if you just look online for a few new workout ideas to stop you getting bored in the gym, there will likely be a bunch of advice that goes along with it. New ideas to try; new foods to sample; new supplements demanding your attention; new methods of maintaining fitness with minimal output. Put it all together, and suddenly, you can be trusting an awful lot of people with your fitness.

FALSE POSITIVES & NEGATIVES

One of the biggest problems with looking for guidance on this subject is that there’s usually money to be made in advising you to try something. Where there’s money to be made, you can be sure there will be dirty tricks.

Those tricks could be positive in their presentation. For example, the huge amount of incredibly positive “this changed my life!” reviews you will see for a workout, supplement, or gym class – which have been written by people who have never even tried it. MarketingLand has even gone so far as to suggest that fake reviews are killing consumer confidence entirely. Given the size of the fitness industry, it’s a ripe ground for this kind of issue.

Then there are the false negatives. That’s when you see innovative products and ideas being trashed; so you should see that as a sign of avoiding that particular thing, right? Not necessarily; as this Crazy bulk review by AreTheyOnSteroids explains, the negative reviews (being posted by rival companies) can be as fake as the positive ones.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?

The simple truth is… not much. These things are going to happen. No matter how much you try and teach yourself to spot a fake review or see that you’re being sold to by the Instagram star who’s meant to just be giving advice… sometimes it’s tempting to be taken in. Don’t we all want to think there’s something out there that will help us instantly lose weight, gain strength, feel better, look fantastic? It’s such a nice lie to tell ourselves.

Realistically, the best you can try to do is see the process of strength and fitness as being part of a circle. There is no one that that is going to fix your fitness desires and make everything feel great. There’s no magic pill, yoga pose, diet, or superfood that is going to make everything better.

Instead, try and see fitness as a rounded circle, with many things contributing to it to get the best results. It can be filled with the things you try and discard, as well as the experiments you indulge in that end up being worth the effort.

By seeing everything as the means to an end rather than the end in and of itself, you have the best chance of rising above the confusion and meeting your fitness goals head on.